Update: March 2018. This work is being submitted to the Communications Matters conference.
Following on from the eyeBlink post, with the help of Fil at Beaumont, I modified the algorithm I'm using to detect when the Grid 2 or Grid 3 software is being used. The image below shows Sensory Software's Grid 2 software being used to construct a sentence. The new text appears in the white area at the top of the window. Fil suggested that I change the Python script to just monitor this area at the top of the window. The script now looks for a change in the amount of black text in this area. After the usual software wrangling I think I got it working. The Python script looks at the top 20% of the window and counts the number of black pixels in this area. Every half second it recounts the number of black pixels. If there is a change in the number of black pixels above a threshold, then a trigger is sent to indicate that the Grid software is being actively used. I'm using a threshold of 20 pixels, so there needs to be an increase or decrease of 20 or more black pixels for a change to be detected. This allows you to move your mouse cursor around in the text area at the top of the Grid window without triggering that there has been a change. The activity detection script needs more testing, but preliminary results seem to show it works. Prior to this, I was monitoring the entire Grid window and looking for a change in the whole window above a threshold. This led to false triggers when cells were selected, but not activated. When a cell is selected, the colour of the cell changes, even when it is not activated to produce text. This change in colour was being detected.
